Not so great watch-keeping by big ships

[Nicholson58]

We are beginning our third season cruising the Caribbean. These are French boats. I’m sure they were just anchoring a bit close.

[Ike]

my experience (being retired Coast Guard) is that many merchant vessels only have one person, supposedly on watch when they are at sea and often that one person is occupied doing other things. The guy in the original post was darn lucky to be seen at all.

Back in 75 the Cutter I was on was traveling up the west coast from San Diego, CA to Port Angeles Wa. Off Point Reyes it was foggy, the pea soup, slice it with a knife kind. We had half a dozen people on the bridge and two lookouts on the flying bridge as well as one at the bow. We were making the usual fog signals with the ships horn. (which was damn loud. It literally knocked me off my feet one time) We detected on radar a ship traveling south toward us on a collision course. We began maneuvering to avoid but lost them in the sea return. We even used the danger signal (five blasts). They passed by not 100 feet away and you could clearly see the bridge was empty. The stupid ****** were on AP. But they had the misfortune of nearly colliding with a USCG ship and got a rather unpleasant welcome in San Francisco.

This was the closest encounter I saw but I saw several others that were pretty scary but fortunately we were able to avoid. Even on approaches to a port they don't seem to have more than one person on the bridge until the last minute when taking on a pilot. So the best advice is to avoid them, unless you are in distress like this guy, and want to be seen. Then do everything you can to get their attention.

[gmakhs]

6 days ago I was sailing from gran canaria to Tenerife , there where no wind so my boat was moving with 2 to 3 knots , I saw some white lights but I couldn't recognize the red or the green light ( the white lights in the front where just to bright )
I alter my course to avoid collision , the ship altered the course to a new collision course , I started the engine and went full throttle with the jib back winding only to hardly avoid the collision,
The ship is an ARMAS liner that sails through canaries , it passed so close that I could see passengers on the deck very clearly .
After the encounter I called the ship on the radio but no answer , I did visit the office of the company the next day just to see their reaction , and they couldn't care less .

[sailormed]

2 days ago 28 km north of cape corse. Looks stupid. But is even more stupid if you know that the big container ship was immobile, not under power just floating. The small one is a Tunisien roro ship.

EDIT: Happened on Oct 7 at 07:30, so daylight conditions :-) Ships are still in this position, the Tunisien ship entered the container ship 10 m deep. First seperation efforts failed.